The Shrouds Review

If you ask most people what makes a David Cronenberg movie, they’ll inevitably use the phrase “body horror”. It’s not unreasonable: his breakthrough came when he codified the genre in the 80s with Scanners and Videodrome, softening the ground for The Fly to become his biggest box office success in 1986. The connection between his name and that subgenre was further solidified for the younger generations when an early Rick & Morty episode dubbed grotesque, sentient mounds of deformed human flesh “Cronenbergs”. And whenever any modern director makes a body horror film, they’re immediately compared to the man. It was Coralie Fargeat for The Substance last year, Julia Ducournau for Titane before that, and obviously, but appropriately, all three features from his son, Brandon.

But there’s a reason the elder Cronenberg has long been uncomfortable with the body horror label. For him, the human body in all its forms is beautiful. It exists to be admired, to be held, to be touched. As the earthly container for our consciousness, the bodies of others are crucial to our sense of who they are. Changes to their bodies do not in the least bit diminish their value as human beings, but can certainly alter our relationship to them. Such changes can come from all directions, but he’s often chosen to focus on those precipitated by technology. This humanistic fascination has been on full display since the turn of the century, as he’s elected to stare into the souls of his characters instead of actualizing their maladies, with the exception of 2022’s Crimes of the Future.

In The Shrouds, he seeks to blend the two approaches, using them to tell a profoundly personal story of loss and grief and the strange experience of connection to another person.

Karsh (Vincent Cassel) is the CEO of GraveTech, whose primary product is a burial shroud that provides a 24/7 view of your loved one’s decomposing corpse. Of course, his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) is one of the bodies, as she passed away from cancer four years ago. While looking at her bones, Karsh notices some strange growths he’s convinced are new, and starts asking around. That night, vandals destroy a handful of the gravestones (including Becca’s), seeming to leave the bodies and shrouds untouched. GraveTech only has a single small site presently, so Karsh is suspicious environmental protesters from one of their prospective expansion locations are the culprits. This leads him to multiple parallel investigations, and changes his relationship to his late wife’s conspiracy obsessed twin sister Terry (Kruger), Terry’s ex-husband and Karsh’s tech guy Maury (Guy Pearce), and the wife of a potential benefactor named Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt).

Of course, this investigation is really just Cronenberg’s way to move the story forward, to facilitate exploration of the emotional space. No matter the subject, his artistry has long been deeply confrontational, staring into the dark complication of human behavior in a bid to better understand it. As such, it should come as no surprise that he’s chosen to interrogate his grief over the loss of his wife Carolyn after nearly forty years of marriage by inventing a technology that allows him to vicariously visualize her remains for all eternity. Just in case the narrative parallels were too abstract, Cassel is styled like Cronenberg, from his dress to his hair to his frankness about morbid subject matters. No, Cronenberg isn’t interested in fucking his wife’s sister. But he is interested in the way we use other people as surrogates for our connection to the deceased, how we search for scraps of them amongst their friends, and how we become desperate for stories of their life from their family members.

To that end, he’s written a highly imperfect and awkward script, which the performers then attempt to deliver naturally. The incongruity throughout makes clear it’s a deliberate effect, an attempt to knock you off-center in order to open you up to the strange story you’re witnessing. And it mostly works: while the way people talk and the things they say are distracting at first, you adjust quickly enough, and it fades into the background (well, until Terry asks Karsh during sex if he’s surprised that her breasts are bigger than Becca’s).

But at the same time, the plot is allowed to dither about for a while, not quite pushed far enough to the background to get out of the way of the characters. There are revelations and realizations and twists, but none of them matter enough to justify the time spent on them. On the one hand, Cronenberg is trying to emulate real life, where we so rarely get satisfying or clean answers. Our dedication to certain tasks drifts in an out as other aspects of life distracts us, and new priorities emerge. But on the other, it leads to a confused experience, whose lack of focus obscure Karsh’s inner life, softening the weight of some crucial moments in his journey. It makes emotionally connecting to the story and characters and ideas much more difficult, even as you’re given the intellectual space to turn them over.

Additionally, a handful of the supporting characters feel like they cease to exist when they’re off screen, like video game NPCs. For example, we barely meet Soo-Min before she becomes an important fulcrum in the larger plot, and they never fill her character in. Maury is only on screen when he’s explicitly needed, which is too bad, as Guy Pearce constantly looking like he just stepped out of the shower always amused me. Then there’s all the stuff with his AI assistant Honey, whose avatar is based on Becca and is also voiced by Kruger, a subplot that feels underutilized for the centrality of its early set up. To say nothing of the minimal on-screen presence of Dr. Jerry Eckler (Steve Switzman), contrasting with how often we hear about his activities.

So as much as I had a good time, my streak of liking but not loving the elder Cronenberg continues. That said, I did indeed still like it, and found it absolutely worthy of my time. It’s a nuanced movie dealing with intense and worldly themes in an abstract manner, most of which seem designed to be more impactful as you age. As always, there are no moments in this film where it feels like Cronenberg is sanding down the edges in a bid for commercial success. He remains a filmmaker who demands that you meet him where he is, and is interested in representing an unfiltered view of humanity, including the less explored corners of the human psyche. Given the prevalence of four-quadrant movies and lack of challenging material in modern blockbusters, I will always welcome such stories, even when they’re imperfect.